Re: when will serializing a document throw?

On Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:34:55 +0200, Hallvord Steen <hsteen@mozilla.com>  
wrote:

>> I think the reason here is that what the spec says is the right thing,  
>> and
>> there probably isn't a Web compat reason not to do the right thing, but
>> browsers haven't considered this to be high priority to fix.
>
> Well, that may be the reason - and I'm not aware of any compat issues  
> anyone has had in the past because of exceptions here. It still seems a  
> bit suspect that all implementors have aligned perfectly on the  
> spec-wise wrong behaviour. It also carries a bit of a risk to push for  
> introducing new exceptions and make code that didn't throw historically  
> change behaviour.

Sure.

Not throwing gives the impression that it will round-trip, but actually it  
won't. That's bad. Catching the error early is better.

(Another solution to this problem would be to make the XML parser error  
tolerant, but that hasn't been a great success so far.)

>> Maybe we could remove the throwing from the spec, but it seems kind of  
>> sad
>> to not catch this in the serializer.
>
> Sort of.. but then again, I guess a completely empty string could be  
> considered a valid representation of a completely empty document..? :-)

XML can't represent an empty document.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software

Received on Friday, 20 September 2013 12:50:55 UTC